Of course, this outcome has repercussions that go beyond just the survival of the protoss: The demonstration of protoss power means Kerrigan isn’t really needed to ensure the survival of the universe, and since nobody has to deal with that headache, the trickle-down effect is that the trilogy never happens.

Never underestimate how far Gamers will go to take away the accomplishments of a woman.

(Note: I actually have no idea who Davey Gunface is, aside from a good ass Starcraft player. This just amused me).

If you JUST want to read pirated ebooks? Kobo is probably the best bang for your buck. But you can also pretty easily sideload ebooks to any kindle via the email interface (which I believe Calibre can utilize).

That said? I have a mix of ebooks I got from legal and less than legal sources. And some of those legal sources include amazon kindle because the prices are REALLY good.

So I like my Onyx Boox. Yeah… it is jank as hell and it allegedly comes with a free 5g modem so be wary of what personal info you put on there. But it works well as I can use the kindle app (which also syncs with my phone) for amazon stuff and the native ereader for any epub files. And because I use a webdav to sync my notes, grabbing new books is as simple as remembering to scp a folder to my nextcloud periodically.

They worked great for 4x games and even slower paced real time strategy games or grand strategies. And they are an excellent shim for more action oriented games that are built around M+KB and don’t support a gamepad.

The problem is that this came out at the time when EVERY PC game was rapidly getting gamepad support. And with very few exceptions (Terraria and Stardew come to mind), it was a worse experience to set up your own mess rather than just use the bindings that let you play civ on an xbox controller anyway.

But yeah. If we can get both this time? That would be perfect AND encourage people to really dig deep on their setups for steam deck games. I know I would use the trackpads and even back buttons more if it wasn’t learning a completely different scheme for a game I also want to play at my desk or in front of my TV.

That said, I am also very wary of fitting all those controls on a single controller. Most of the mock-ups people make have HORRIBLE ergonomics. But… Valve knocked the Steam Deck out of the park so day one.

And yet?

Mastodon is full of actual conversations between people. Someone says something. Someone else replies and an actual conversation happens where people respond to each other.

Lemmy? It almost always devolves into people trying to one up each other and aggressively talk at each other. It is like we speed ran reddit and went from “How dare you have a different opinion” to “I am going to cherry pick a sentence and build a whole fucking straw city from that”.

Honestly?

I vastly prefer almost everyone I have interacted with on mastodon over basically every lemmy user. Because lemmy still thinks it is reddit but also is totally over their ex but do you think he is thinking of me and can I send him a picture of your dick to show it is bigger?

Whereas mastodon? People kind of just want to talk. We largely understand that twitter has been a shithole for… most of its existence. So rather than try to reinvent it (bsky and threads) we are learning from it in the same way cohost learned from tumblr (and died even faster…).

And the lunatics who need to scream about what federation is and why it is The Future? They aren’t talking about basically anything else. They are keeping to themselves and talking about how amazing the community can be… while the rest of us are actually being a community.

Because the mastodon evangelists are horrible.

Back when there was any question of what platform to migrate to? Threads and bluesky were “Get an invite and make an account”

Mastodon was people insisting that EVERYONE needed to understand what federation is and the underlying philosophy. When really they should have just said “Sign up for one of these instances. It is like email where it doesn’t really matter what provider you have”. Countless times I tried to explain to folk on a message board or discord and would say “Just make an account on one of these four or five instances”. And, like clockwork, someone would “well ackshually” me and insist that people can’t use Mastodon without understanding the fundamental concept of federation and how picking the right instance is important and people can just delete and remake their accounts until they are satisfied.

So when it was time for the big influencers to move? They went to where people were already congregating and where they didn’t need to host an educational seminar to tell someone how to make an account.

Yeah. This isn’t the first time the news app and the core nextcloud updates have fought each other in weird and mysterious ways (for me or others). I forget how I solved it last time (I think it was a similar case of needing to manually update to bleeding edge and then tweak things) but… I just don’t care anymore.

I don’t know who is right or wrong in how nextcloud is maintained (my instinct is the nextcloud devs because… have you seen nextcloud? but also, most apps don’t have this recurring problem). But at this point, the benefits I get out of it are largely gone. And when so many issues boil down to “We need more people and resources to maintain this”, it kind of feels like getting off the train BEFORE it crashes rather than after.

I’m on the alpha and it still won’t update any of my feeds. And going through the github issues it is basically summed up as “We will do another stable release once we have a frontend developer” which is basically never. So, at best, it will work until it doesn’t and then I have to fix it myself yet again and… yeah.

And if my choice is to run an older version of nextcloud to support one app? Hell no.

To be fair, that is true of all miniatures and model kits. It is generally less noticeable if you are dealing with injection molded sprues as a good pair of nippers can get you most of the way. But it is still good to have some sandpaper to touch things up.

Hell, I use an old pair of nippers to remove supports and overhangs from a lot of my “normal” prints.

… and now I am really curious what a 3d printed runner would be. Might do a proof of concept/experiment in onshape.

Yeah. Although I guess now I don’t really know how resin would handle those kinds of support either.

And yeah, it is pretty funny that a resin printer and curer and ventillation setup comes out cheaper than most 40k armies. But the answer probably is to scale up models (there is an artist on mastodon I keep meaning to throw money at).

Thanks

Basiaclly all DRM models have had variations of that problem. It, again, boils down to what the check is, when they do it, and how often they do it.

For example:

• Back in the day, Splinter Cell Conviction (and a few other ubi games) actually connected to a remote server for game logic. If you were running a cracked version and a blocker (I think peerguardian is what we used? Been a minute) then you would actually notice your game just completely hang when you went through certain doors and Sam wouldn’t start talking until you turned PG off.
• Similarly, quite a few securom and even starforce games would add the DRM check as part of the fundamental gameplay loop so you were potentially checking dozens of times per SECOND. This was a rapid checksum or a value in memory but it was still very noticeable

And Denuvo is kind of the worst of all worlds since it is an activation model which, potentially, involves phoning home to a server.

To my knowledge, every single case of “Denuvo killed performance in mah gerhms!!” was either

• Complete noise. Like, less than 5% difference which could just as easily be a case of having a different tab open in your browser
• A case of a poor implementation where the checks were way too frequent

I am not aware of anything that was fundamentally denuvo itself. I would love to know more if you can point to a documented example but everything I have seen that actually has numbers ends up being one of the above.

I am not going to say that I think Denuvo is good for gaming. I fully accept the importance of DRM for week one sales (which make a huge difference to publishers) and understand that activation models are incredibly useful for that but I also think activation model DRM is fundamentally shite because it renders games unplayable in order “Why is this random ass server plugged in in this closet?”.

But I do think people overly attribute negative performance to denuvo. Implemented correctly, there are MAYBE a few checks per hour and that is system noise. The problem is that, for whatever reason, so many games end up adding the denuvo checks to critical path operations that either completely delay the loading of a new area or tank performance completely because it is checking a dozen times per minute. And that is 100% on Denuvo for not working properly with the studios they license their tools to.

But for the ones who DO implement it sanely? It is barely noticeable to the end user… from a performance standpoint.

Remember kids: Hate mother fuckers for what they actually do. Rather than going the “bitch eating crackers” route.

Didn’t this happen weeks ago?

Also: as the French Monk incident taught us: this ain’t worth shit when the site is closing down in 48 hours and every server is on fire.

In all cases? You are pirating what is “yours”

And they change nothing? It still boils down to human beings being liable.

Hosting costs money. Theoretically (some) cryptocurrency can obfuscate that but… there is a reason graph problems got really popular again for a little bit.

But domain names also cost money. They also need to be registered to a person/company.

That is why a lot of torrent sites end up getting their domain stolen.

Also, all of this ignores the actual developers. But that is par for the course when it comes to discussing liability with open source projects.

Yeah. It is why I really like that Proton basically say "We will turn on you in an instant if we get a legal order. But here is what we’ll actually turn over and here is how you can minimize your vulnerability to that.

C&Ds and legal threats still go to a person who isn’t going to go to jail or have their wages garnished by Mario until the end of their days.

At best you have a single gitlab instance running in a country that is known to not cooperate with those kinds of demands. But… just ask the various torrent sites how well that works after actively pissing off an army of lawyers who don’t mind slipping a hosting company a couple hundred bucks to get the identity and address of the person paying for that.

Plenty of hosts and providers over the years have claimed to be super privacy oriented and blah blah blah. Once they get a legal request, they roll over. Because they aren’t going to prison for the customer anymore than they are going to prison for you.

Nope.

C&Ds and legal threats still go to a person who isn’t going to go to jail or have their wages garnished by Mario until the end of their days.

At best you have a single gitlab instance running in a country that is known to not cooperate with those kinds of demands. But… just ask the various torrent sites how well that works after actively pissing off an army of lawyers who don’t mind slipping a hosting company a couple hundred bucks to get the identity and address of the person paying for that.

What is the alternative?

Closed source “I swear this executable that will let you play all the games you want is legit” hosted on sourceforge or random websites that get hugged to death every day that ends in a y?

Also: it isn’t like that would stop this kind of legal action. MS/Github are barely a factor. It is the devs themselves getting the “hey, stop it or we’ll turn you into indentured servants” letters.

Part of it is the same “human speech” aspects that have plagued NLP work over the past few years. Nobody (except the poor postdoctoral bastard who is running the paper farm for their boss) actually speaks in the same way that scholarly articles are written because… that should be obvious.

This combines with the decades of work by right wing fascists to vilify intellectuals and academia. If you have ever seen (or written) a comment that boils down to “This youtuber sounds smug” or “They are presenting their opinion as fact” then you see why people prefer “natural human speech” over actual authoritatively researched and tested statements.

But the big one? Most of the owners of the various journals are REALLY fucking litigious and will go scorched earth on anyone who is using their work (because Elsevier et al own your work) to train a model.